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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

From the Special-Effects Studio to Your Driveway

Last Sunday, the local Star Tribune newspaper published my op-ed on "New technology: Driverless cars are just around the corner," subtitled "But in the not-too-distant future, driverless cars will be leaving the special-effects studio and heading for your driveway." Regular readers of this blog will recognize some of the thoughts from my posts last October 31 on "Driverless Cars." Here's the article:

A car without a driver has long been the stuff of B-grade entertainment. For children, there’s Herbie “The [Volkswagen] Love Bug” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

Who can forget “Knight Rider,”
the 1980s television show in which David Hasselhoff was routinely
out-emoted by a custom Pontiac Trans Am? In the 1977 schlock classic “The Car,” a driverless Lincoln Continental terrorized a Utah town. The 1983 movie "Christine” dramatized a Steven King story about a Plymouth Fury with a mean streak.

But in the not-too-distant future, driverless cars will be leaving the special-effects studio and heading for your driveway. Back in 2004, the U.S. Department of Defense held a contest to see if driverless cars could negotiate a 150-mile course. None of the entrants succeeded. By 2012, Google was announcing
that its fleet of autonomous cars was logging several hundred thousand
miles in real-world traffic on roads across California and Nevada.

The potential safety benefits of driverless cars are remarkable. More
than 30,000 Americans are killed each year in road accidents, and
another 240,000 or so have injuries severe enough to require
hospitalization. But the driverless car won’t get drunk. It won’t drive
like an excitable teenager. It won’t suffer momentary lapses of
attention. It will observe traffic rules. It won’t experience slowing
reflexes or diminishing vision as it ages.

About 86 percent of U.S. workers drive to their jobs, and
the average travel time is 25 minutes each way, according the U.S.
Census Bureau. Multiply that by two directions, five days a week, 50
weeks a year, and the average person is spending more than 200 hours per
year — the equivalent of five 40-hour workweeks — sitting in a car
commuting to and from work.

In a world of driverless cars, this time — and all the
additional time we now spend driving — could be used to work, draw up a
shopping list, watch a movie, read a book, make a phone call, look out
the window or even take a nap.

Traffic congestion could diminish, because automated
cars, with their electronic reflexes, would be able to travel more
closely — even “platooning” together into caravans. Also, automated cars
can use narrower lanes and road shoulders, creating room for more lanes
of traffic.
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Ultimately, driverless cars could reshape our perspective
on what it means to own a car. For example, instead of owning a car
that is unused for 22 hours on many days, you might just dial up a car
to pick you up and drop you off when you need it. The savants at Google
predict that driverless cars could reduce the overall number of cars by
90 percent.

Imagine a long road trip where you can intentionally fall asleep “at the wheel” — and arrive safely the next morning.

* * *Already headed this way

An evolution in which driving becomes more automated is
already underway. Most cars now on the road have cruise control that
regulates speed, antilock brakes that pump much faster than any human
foot can and headlights that turn on automatically.

Newer cars are boasting features like the ability to
“see” the area around a car and assist with stopping or swerving, and to
parallel-park without a human hand on the wheel.
Parents of teenage drivers and insurance companies are
encouraging the installation of equipment that monitors speed and
watches to see whether braking is done gradually or suddenly. Cars now
speak directions to the driver and accept a number of vocal commands.

What’s next? A vocal command to set cruise control, stop
or turn? Cars that automatically come to a full stop at stop signs and
red lights? Cars that cannot exceed the speed limit?

Eventually, some parking lot in a crowded downtown area
will announce that it is open only for driverless cars. That is, you
will need to drive up to the entrance, then let the car park itself.
That parking lot will be able to cram many more cars into its space,
with fewer door dings and fender dents. And so other parking lots will
follow.

Some city will announce that cars linked together with
“platoon” technology can drive in its carpool lanes or in special toll
lanes. Some state with wide-open spaces will announce that driverless
cars are legal on its miles of lightly congested highways. Some
community will announce that when you reach a residential area, all
human drivers must hand off to the automation system for a slow and safe
drive down the last mile or two of local roads.

Of course, the primary response of every honest and
red-blooded American to the prospect of driverless cars must be: “Who
can I sue when it goes wrong?”

Driverless cars will assuredly require all sorts of legal
changes. For example, the state of New York has a law requiring that
drivers keep at least one hand on the steering wheel at all times. But
California, Nevada and Florida have already passed laws about driverless
cars, and other states won’t be far behind.

However, I suspect that a combination of our litigious
culture and the auto insurance companies will actually create strong
incentives for the adoption of driverless cars.

My car insurance company already offers a deal by which
if I have equipment installed that can monitor my speed and whether I am
prone to quick stops, I can pay less for my car insurance. What happens
when your insurance company politely informs you that if your car has
certain automatic features installed, your car insurance is one amount,
and if you do not have those features, your car insurance is five times
as much? Or that your car insurance rates will drop according to what
proportion of the time you get out of the way and let the car drive
itself?

* * *

These are the good old days

The technology for fully driverless cars is still a few
years away from being commercially viable. But as it arrives, the social
gains in safety, time and convenience will be too large to ignore.
Federal and state governments have been mandating safety features in
cars for years — and automated driving will eventually be safer than a
significant share of the drivers currently on the road.

To save time, I’m already starting to get all nostalgic
about the good old days of staring fixedly at the bumpers ahead of me
and wincing every time someone in the next lane weaves back and forth.
But before long, I suspect we will look back with bemusement on the days
when enormous crowds of people each maneuvered their own piece of
transportation machinery weighing several thousand pounds within a few
feet of each other, both at high speeds and in stop-and-start
conditions.

Automobile travel transformed how people relate to
distance: It decentralized how people live and work, and gave them a new
array of choices for everything from the Friday night date to the
long-distance road trip. I occasionally marvel that we can take our
family of five, with all our gear, door-to-door for a getaway to a YMCA
family camp 250 miles away in northern Minnesota — all for the marginal
cost of less than a tank of gas.

As driverless cars transform transportation yet again,
adding levels of flexibility, safety and convenience, the car will
become a sort of mobile room, just a place to spend time while the rest
of our lives are going on.

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Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College in St. Paul.